Murderous Wives: Hot Topic Even In 17th Century

February 10, 1991|By Nina Burleigh.

Domestic violence is a topic historians have mostly ignored, but popular literature from 17th Century England indicates that its lethal effects captivated the public imagination, according to a Newberry Library fellow who will be speaking this week.

Frances Dolan, an associate professor of English from Miami University of Ohio, is writing a book on domestic crimes in England, and Saturday she will talk on murderous wives in popular literature and the disparity in legal status between women who killed husbands and husbands who killed wives.

``Pamphlets were the 17th Century version of the movie-of-the-week, about actual crimes,`` Dolan says. ``The topic of murderous wives was very popular.``

Dolan also researched court records to come up with a legal picture of domestic violence to go with the popular literature. Court records indicate men were two to three times as likely as women to kill their spouses, she says.

``But the story of the wife killing her husband was much more likely to be told in popular literature,`` she says. ``The popular representation amplified the threat of a wife killing her husband and played down the real threat.``

Dolan says at the time, murdering a husband was a far more serious crime than murdering a wife. If a man killed his wife, he was charged with homicide, but if a woman killed her husband, she was charged with petty treason, viewed as a crime against the king.

``It was analogous to a crime against authority and the structure of dominance and submission,`` Dolan says. Wives had almost no legal standing as individuals, she notes, although she has come across a 17th Century book that addressed women`s legal rights.

Dolan became interested in historical domestic violence while studying Renaissance literature as a graduate student. She came across a wealth of material on domestic violence to which historians and literary critics had paid scant attention.

``These popular texts are overwhelmingly about women as perpetrators of domestic violence,`` she says. ``Why did the culture represent women as dangerous and different? One thing these accounts of domestic violence try to explore is what would make a woman do such a thing. In some ways, telling the story was a way of exploring the difficulties of wifely status at the time.`` Dolan is working on a book to be called ``Dangerous Familiars: Popular Accounts of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700.`` Lecture: ``Home-Rebels and House Traitors,`` at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., at 11 a.m. Saturday; free. 1-312-943-9090, ext. 310.